Supermassive Black Hole A Star

Author notes

Ep. 36, Page 10

smbhax

on Jan. 31, 2019

If you're into black hole stuff, there's a pretty cool new-ish article by NASA about observations of an evolving black hole's environment by their NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR : P) X-ray reading instrument on the International Space Station. Observing a 10-solar-mass black hole about 10,000 light years away and reading the time differences between X-rays coming directly from the super-hot corona above the black hole's poles, and those reflecting off the toroidal accretion "disk" circling it, they were able to see that "the corona contracted vertically from roughly 100 to 10 miles."

The short video there is worth watching too—if like me you were ignorant of what a black hole's "corona" is, for instance, or how torus-like accretion disks may be—because it does a good job of illustrating how the hole's structures—event horizon, corona, accretion disk—line up.